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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 16 |
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"THE No. 1 LADIES DETECTIVE AGENCY"  |
HBO turns up a winner
with smash new series
of TheColumnists.com
If I ran any of the conventional commercial TV networks, I'd always be sweating bullets whenever Home Box Office introduced a new weekly series. Series television is what the commercial networks are all about, so when a pay TV network like HBO comes out with a superior series like "The Sopranos," it's like they're coming right into regular network turf with a commando raid on their viewers.
Well, brace youselves, all you regular networks: HBO has done it again.
Next Sunday night at 8, HBO premieres "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency," the movie-length premiere of the new mystery series based on the riotously popular series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith. It's an absolute first round knockout for HBO. If you've read the novels, you'll open your windows and shout "Hallelujah! They done it right!" And if you haven't read them, you'll be heading for the bookshop Monday morning.
No, "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" isn't "The Sopranos" or anything like it. It's sort of a mystery show the way "Rumpole of the Bailey" was a mystery show. If you want a close parallel in the TV mystery genre, there really isn't any--although I might possibly suggest it's something like "Hetty Winthrop Investigates," if you can imagine a black Hetty Winthrop opening a detective agency in an African village.
The main character is a family-sized, divorced African woman named "Precious" Ramotswe, who inherits a small, but significant amount of money from her father, but decides she doesn't want to follow in his footsteps as a cattle merchant. Instead, she has the romantic notion of using her native wit and her nearly endless curiosity to start her own business--a detective agency!
Precious devours mysteries and pretty much figures she would like solving the sort of mysteries that Miss Marple does in the Agatha Christie novels. Of course, there's a slight problem with that, being that Precious lives in a small African village where there aren't very many puzzling murders to solve. But she thinks she'll make out all right since there are always other kinds of mysteries people would like solved.
And she's certainly right about that. For instance, there are women who would like to know if their husbands are "carrying on" with other women. Precious can handle those cases. And there's the occasional child-stealing case to ponder--and, after a certain degree of difficulty, Precious can handle those, too.
So, basically, your mystery is part whimsy, part cultural exotica--the atmosphere is certainly not your typical urban mystery setting--and wholly different and full of surprises. Precious is also someone I guarantee you're going to like--a good-natured lady who's only cynical about men--and full of fun.
Everything about the first two-hour episode is Grade A. It was made under HBO's ongoing relationship with England's BBC. The writer-director was Anthony Minghella, who died tragically at age 54 while putting the final touches on the American edition of the movie. He was one of the best feature film directors around and a specialist in mysteries who cut his teeth on episodes of "Inspector Morse" when that was England's No. 1 mystery series. Minghella won the Academy Award for directing "The English Patient" in 1996, a film that also won the Best Picture Oscar that year, then came back with the marvelous new version of Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley" in 1999.
As a result, "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" has that feature film glow and in no way looks like some cheap TV series knocked together by some low budget U.S. network. It was filmed entirely on location in Africa and much of the cast is filled with African actors.
And Precious is played by Grammy-award winning soul singer Jill Scott, who's absolutely fabulous in the role. This is a real "star is born" performance for Scott, who should move right to the top of the "A" list of actors once people see her in this role.
Supporting Scott as Mma Makutsi, Precious' coldly "professional" secretary/assistant, is Anika Noni Rose from "Dreamgirls," who shows an entirely new side of her talent in this comic role.
The script by Minghella and screenwriter Richard Curtis sticks pretty close to Smith's novel, which has its abiding mystery element, but is always first and foremost about us getting to know how differently the Africans in Botswana go about handling what they call mysteries.
I love the very natural humor in this show because it doesn't come from a joke-heavy script and proceeds instead from the characters themselves. When, for instance, Precious sets out to get photographic evidence that an errant husband is cheating on his wife, she winds up taking pictures of herself being seduced by the randy husband.
Another time, an observer watches as Precious has the sign painter amend the new sign o\n her office to add "No. 1" to the words Ladies Detective Agency. "How do you know it's No. 1?" the observer asks and Precious calmly explains it's because there are no other ladies detective agencies, so her agency must be No. 1.
If the very high standards of this opening episode are maintained throughout the run of the series, HBO will have once again made it mandatory for all people who want to see TV's best shows to quickly sign up for cable and start subscribing to HBO.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The photo is courtesy of the BBC and HBO.This column first posted March 23, 2009.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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